GenCon 2010: Fantasy fencing with 38 Studios page 2

Staying the course

According to Schilling, 38 Studios set a course for the MMO five years ago, and he is "proud as hell" that they're still on track to deliver the end product. "When I'm playing the MMO, it's still the same game we set out to make," Schilling boasted. He hates the word "scope" and what it entails, because it usually means cutting all the cool stuff instead of keeping it.

So what's kept the team on track over the years? Schilling, a former baseball player, admits to a penchant for motivational phrases. "The first thing I ever told my team was that if you're not going to do it better than it's ever been done before, go work for somebody else. It resonates in everything we do. And when we have guests that start purchasing our game — and they are guests, not customers, because you're providing a lengthy, multi-year service — we want to be the company that provides that extra level of service."

As strong as the leads push their teams to excel in all areas, 38 Studios' founder says that they reward that hard work well. "We tell everyone in the company — and we mean it — that you'll never work for another company that cares as much for you as we do. And I have to deliver on that."

A guy walks into an inn...

One of the theories behind building the MMO was finding the right art style of the game, something that took a full year to accomplish. Todd McFarlane told them to start small by making two fantasy staples "unbelievably cool": a human model and an inn. The idea was that if the team could make those two elements kick-ass, then everything that follows would be more so.

The team truly believes that by doing the small details excellently, it will create a tremendous end result. They talked about how one artist spent a fair amount of time designing furniture for each of the races that would be instantly identifiable as belonging to that race, or how the audio team worked hard to create snippets of music that exuded a particular race's theme and identity. For example, the Jutten race are big and heavy, and their score is full of thumping percussion to help players make that connection.

Curt Schilling wasn't afraid to aim high, either: "We've got designers, creators, developers, artists who have been on everything from Ultima Online, EQ, EQ2, World of Warcraft. They've been down this road before. They know that if they're going to make you walk away from WoW in two years, it's got to be what we say it's going to be: different."